


Asterisms

by windbetweenthestars



Category: True Detective
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-06
Updated: 2015-01-06
Packaged: 2018-03-06 10:49:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3131756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windbetweenthestars/pseuds/windbetweenthestars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rust / stars - it’s canon, right? A series of poetic drabbles from someone who loves the night skies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Lone Star

**Author's Note:**

> Elsewhere I named this thing "Constellations" since I somehow missed ironoxide has a WIP by similar title, available here on AO3. Of course I changed mine, out of respect to said fine writer. The 3 first bits were posted in tumblr during the glorious year of 2014.

Through the cold, dark and impossible, the star maintains its power to soothe his sore existence. There, at the tip of the little dipper’s handle, the bright celestial nail around which the universe rotates ever so slowly with a deep and resonate hum.

It marks his spot, tells him exactly where he is. He fears to lose that certitude. He never travels south enough to try. 

Facing north, he feels the weight of the skies on his shoulders. He has read the stories and made some of his own. He pictures in his head the  _axis mundi_  impaling the mountains of air. The sky pole, carrying the star-embroidered lid of all things. And the lone star as the brittle brass tack keeping it all together.

On the southern wastelands the imaginary pole is lost behind the horizons. But he’s still able to set himself under the stars, the soon-forgotten rush singing in his bones, and fix his eyes on Polaris. Dozing off and crawling back to consciousness, he finds the sky-nail just where he left it. Everything else has shifted.

What conceit, to ride the world’s axle like so. After all he should not forget what he truly is: not a heavenly body, but a grain of sand in the vast sinkhole of reality.

One day the nail will lose its purpose. The earth-drawn circle around it turns slowly eccentric and within a millennia or so, the firmament will rest on dark masses of nothing. Aeons ahead, humankind being long gone by then, there will be another nail to serve as a ground anchor for some other lost creature.

Anti-sunwise, the planet continues its dance through space and time. At the North Pole the invisible pillar rises to the void. The night lasts for six months and the stars rotate in flat circles, forever.


	2. Born of Dust, born of Heaven

The day they find the crowned-one-in-the-fields is a rumble of rolling clouds and creeping quick patches of sunlight. By dusk it’s gotten all clear. It’s almost time, but first things first. He’s gonna have a drink.

Smoking in the parking lot, not quite sober anymore, he eyes the night skies just in case and makes some mental notes. Sometimes a terrestrial love-map of deadly insanity might reflect an innocent stellar one for some obsessive and maybe significant purpose. He needs to see it later, during the small hours, just about when the ritual took place. And since work is all he’s got left, after the dinner and several hours of sleepless dreams, he crawls out and takes a look above.  
  
New moon, a pitch black sky. Venus in Libra, Jupiter in Scorpio. Mars in Leo, a bloody stab wound in the abdomen of the giant celestial feline. 

Venus in Libra, just like 8 years ago. He remembers.   
  
* * *

The damned star chart for Sophia, made and brought home by some eager hippie friend of Claire’s.

There it was, a tabloid sized sheet pretending to foretell the fate of his week-old daughter by some fully random display of stars and planets. Claire was silently amused but he could never shut it, could he. “The only astronomical object you can base any realistic predictions on” he said, “is a comet on a collision course with Earth”. They stared at him, blankly. “And the prophecy? Your life’s gonna be over pretty soon”.

What he did not mention was this: all Sophia’s stars were already counted by him seven days before.

He was having yet another cigarette outside the hospital doors, giddy, exhausted, victorious. The day was soon about to end, the day of joy, gore and dreadful miracles. Low in the southwest a thin slice of crescent Moon floated, a silver cup into which a radiating pearl-pair of planets - Jupiter, Mars, in a perfect aligning line -  were just about to drop, thrown by some giant unseen hand. The chalice of Moon, just like the vessel of Claire’s body whence the seven pounds of alien life had rushed out just a couple of hours ago, in a flash of pain, noise and a sharp sudden smell of iron. Awestruck they held their daughter, womb-forged, her eyes dark and slightly slanted, conical head slowly re-forming after the final dive out towards the world.

Stars are born like people, he mused. And they grow old and then they die. Born as silent unintelligent ideas deep inside the immense nebulae, stardust and gas as their cold makings. Then an insane amount of heat and energy forms a clump of matter that will eventually become a star. A source of light that seems eternal. But nothing ever is.   
  
* * *  
  
It’s been eight years and her daughter’s not gone. She’s out there as a heavy presence, an ever-pulsating white dwarf with a dense diamond heart.  
  
Since her death he’s tried to quiet the noise of absolute loss and failed yet again. All this time, his every waking breath, he’s been absorbing the seismic waves sent by the child that once was. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for blackeyedblonde's tear-jerking Father's day fic challenge.


	3. Mapping the skin. Alaska, late 1970’s

All through the fall, they gather. Winter’s for hunting and setting traps, hauling axes to naked birches, piling tree-bodies on white sheets of snow to dry. Come springtime, they fish: nets are spread like layers of smoke under the thinning ice, endless hooked lines drawn. They skin and gut fat mother burbot and gorge themselves on creamy roe and fried fish liver.

As the nights grow brighter, their cheeks gain color. Once, dawntime, Rust wakes up to a bright hoot. A skein of cranes chases the fading stars, blowing their trumpets, warm summer winds on their shoulders. The ice sings and finally vanishes with a mighty bang and a roar. Soon every creek and puddle is swarming with life. The hunter becomes the hunted.

For a month or so, the Cohle boys will be feed for the dense flying armies of mosquitoes. They are silent, sullen reservoirs of blood, clad from head to toe, fully oblivious to the bites. The drone of insects surrounds Rust like a blanket with thousand wings. 

The only visible star kneels behind the horizon for barely an hour. During these moments, the sky is clear white-blue with traces of scarlet (stale milk, a hint of salt) and the birds are tireless companions to the bright night heavens: scratching lines to the clouds, weaving thick tangled tapestries of sound.

Every winter he considers joining the team just for regular hot showers. Every summer, piercing the lake’s clear water-eye for the first time, he ridicules this plan. And now there is a larger plan, a body of an idea.  He needs a car, and for the car he needs money. A pile of beaver skins can’t buy him out of the largest state in the Union. So he’s got himself a job.

Between his shifts he dreams of clean white rooms, electric bulbs, spin dryers. Warm water flowing from stainless steel taps. Radiators. His weakness: the eighth deadly sin of self-indulgence.

And he’s met someone.

Her father owns the lodge and the gas pump, and when his shift is about to end, she hovers by, all quiet and conspirative. She keeps two sharpies in her jeans pocket, red and black - she texts all the signs for her dad with a precise hand. Her eyebrows are a pair of tiger moth larvae, wildly alive, constantly trying to escape her face. 

They drive aimlessly on her father’s pickup. Every once in a while they pull over on desolate road ends, planting cigarette butts on their feet, windows closed tight: a filthy greenhouse filled with smoke, radio static and adolescent bile. She hates her father, or so she claims. Rust wonders idly how is it like to hate someone you live with, a person who’s your sole means of survival. There’s little room for hate (or love) when you’re in the wilderness, teamed up against the big white cold. 

They never get into town. Rust suspects she avoids the busier roads on purpose, but he’s past caring. Yes he’s a well-known freak and now a dropout also, but he enjoys her company.  She’s bright, and sometimes he manages to be reluctantly funny. They talk about solid things. Birds. Typefaces. The ALCAN highway, the one to take them South some day.  
  
He thinks about kissing her. He’s not sure if he wants to.  


Early June, he spies some dusky grouse on display. The male parades in circles, flashing his obscene throat sac while the females watch and evaluate, all beady eyes and modest brown plumage. The choice is made and then it’s all over in a brief puff of feathers.  Neat and practical, he thinks -  although just how the male’s superiority manifests itself in these weird rituals is above his knowledge of Darwinian science. No time wasted. Duties promptly followed. Humans should take note.

It’s deep deep summer and as they completely lose track of time in the white night she finally reaches for him. The cab has all the wrong dimensions, so they stumble into the surrounding hall of trees. They fall down with a roll and a rustle and a quick staccato of crackled twigs and the occasional early blueberry adding to the mess but luckily no red ants. For a flying moment he worries about the washing. It is his only work shirt and laundry is always a challenge. He tears the shirt off, a mistake, ‘cause they are not alone. As their bodies collide, the minuscule offerings of blood are crushed between the flesh in a sacrificial mash of chitin and sweat. He hears neither whine nor buzz, the solid boom of her limbs the only sound in his skull. 

Only after his head has eclipsed into sweet shining black he finally feels the  _culicidae_ , landing on his bare skin in thousands. 

Back in the cab she traces the bump-paths on his back, first with her fingers and then, after a giggly fit, constellates the bites with her black sharpie. It takes a while connecting all the dots. Years later, getting his chest pricked with black ink, Rust feels a sudden flash of completion.

**********

Travis is all quiet while his son is having a wash by the sink but  _the ‘fuck did you take your shirt off for, outside, this fucking time of the year_  can be read from his face from miles away.

He never asks who drew the star chart on Rust’s back.


End file.
